Archive for 'Overwhelming Advantage'

Here is a short video I have created for you to see how I can help you get on the first page of Google and therefore more customers and clients:

Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google. It’s understandable why because it’s not much use being any other page. Nobody goes past page one, in fact 20% of the people don’t even know you can scroll down!

Although that seems hard to believe, it’s true. What’s also true is that the Yellow Pages are dead. I asked someone recently how much they spent per month on advertising in the Yellow Pages. They said about $600. I then asked him how many phone calls they’ve gotten over the past month from the Yellow Pages ad. He said two. So in essence he was paying $300 per lead by advertising in the Yellow Pages.

In the past, about 15 years ago, I also advertised in the Yellow Pages and spent about $1200 a month. I don’t think we ever got more than five calls a month from that ad. But that’s just the nature of things, things change. And things are changing dramatically for those who want to advertise and market their business.

All of the old mediums of advertising are suffering right now. Newspapers, television, radio, direct mail, etc. all have declining revenues because of one main reason: the Internet. Of course there are other factors such as the economy but the Internet is growing dramatically in advertising revenues. Google’s revenue last year was $22,000,000,000 just in advertising. The next closest one was Time Warner, the mega-opulous of traditional media and it had $9,000,000,000 in advertising revenue. And Google’s revenue is up substantially from the previous year.

Internet advertising has one over-arching, overwhelming advantage over all other forms of advertising: traceability. You can track down to the penny how much money a person makes from any given ad. They know exactly where it came from, what keywords they used to find it, what the resolution of their monitor was (I’m not sure why they bother with that one), what documents referred them to it, what domains they came from, etc.

No other form of advertising has this capability. Everything else is just guesswork. The Nielsen ratings, as good as they try to be, are never as accurate. And that’s the advantage of the Internet.

Not only does it track it all, in many ways it’s free. But free is a bit of a misnomer. Anyone now can write a blog or an article and have the whole world able to view it. Whether they do it or not is an entirely different issue and that’s where the problem with Internet marketing lies-it’s so easy that it’s become very crowded.

To print a newspaper you have to have massive expensive machines and elaborate distribution channels. Much of the same things are true regarding television and radio. But with the Internet, all you have to have is a connection. You can even access it from your phone nowadays. And I predict even more dramatic changes in the near future.

But the Internet has also come of age because now local search marketing is the new rage, or at least a fairly new phenomenon of the last two years. The ability to target a specific industry in a single zip code, town, city, county and/or state has never really been viable before. Now it is and it is very cost effective.

You can easily target a few specific phrases for your business that you think people are typing in the search for you. Because that’s where people are going to search for you anyway. They’re not going to the phonebook anymore.

So the key question here is not IF you will become involved in local search marketing, but WHEN? It will be a rare business that survives in the future without using this technology. You simply must have a website and it must be properly formatted. But you must also drive traffic to it because it’s very very difficult to be found on its own. Most people don’t have the time, energy, or money to to compete with the big boys and their elaborate websites.

But a simple, SEO-friendly and optimized website is an absolute necessity and as long as it’s effectively marketed, it can be your best lead generator possible.

Its also a lot less expensive than the Yellow Pages!

Contact me when you’re ready to increase your sales and find new customers. Just use the form on the right or call me at 702-726-2427.